Nov 3, 2024
Let us pray:
Lord of heaven’s reach, of earth reborn
you call us from starless graves to sing under infinite skies:
we praise your name for those who have walked this way
unheralded and unnumbered but known to you,
their beginning. their end, their joy in life;
give us the same grace to be unbound and take the step of faith;
through Jesus Christ, the alpha and the omega. Amen.
Stories help us make sense of our lives. As one of my favorite fictional characters, the Doctor, says, stories are where our memories go when they’ve been forgotten. Although there are lots of different types of stories, I want us to think about two of them today. One type are “stories of origin”. These are stories that describe how we came to be who we are. They might, for instance, chart the journeys of our ancestors from one place to another – telling us the story of how we came to be here. Clergy will have a call story about how God called them into ministry. Mine happened when I was volunteering in a child care center in north Minneapolis on a Saturday afternoon and had a moment where God spoke into my heart. It’s a story that helps me make sense of my vocation.
The other type of story I want us to think about this morning are the counterpart to stories of origin. These are called stories of destination. They don’t tell us where we’ve been – instead, they tell us where we’re going. These can be harder stories to tell – or to understand – because it’s easier to look back into the past at what already happened than it is to see into the future.
When we read the Gospel, we often try to put the reading in context. Where is Jesus in his ministry? At the beginning? Right before Holy Week? Because the context tells us a lot. And so it’s important to put our reading from Revelation today in context. Not just its context within Revelation – but Revelation’s placement at the end of the Bible.
You see, Genesis and Revelation are bookends to the whole Biblical story. The Book of Genesis helps us understand our beginnings in the broadest terms – it’s our story of origin. Humanity was created by God to live in a creation that is good, but ultimately makes the choice to disrupt its relationship with God through sinful behaviors.
Today’s reading from Revelation – and really, the whole book – is a story of destination. The challenge of looking ahead helps explain why it’s so weird – like the sort of fever dream Dr. Seuss might have after a sleepless night reading Stephen King. But within its bizarre predictions of dragons and battles and stars falling out of the sky, it’s asking some important broad questions. Where are you headed? In what direction is your life taking you? What is your true destination? We need a weird book like Revelation to help us think about the future. Specifically, the end times.
When the church talks about the end times, it’s easy to have our imaginations get stuck in the sorts of things we find in the Left Behind series of books. But the end times aren’t just about the end of time – whether that means the end of our lives, or the end of history, or the end of the universe, or all three at once. The end times are also about our sense of purpose –the ultimate goal of our lives.
To put it another way – what are we hoping for?
The genre of literature Revelation belongs to is all about unveiling reality. For Christians, Revelation yanks back the veil to show us – even if it’s just for a moment – the truth about God and the world we live in.
And one of the truths that Revelation keeps coming back to over and over again is the truth that God has initiated a relationship with us, to which we respond faithfully. A covenantal relationship. We see this time and again in Scripture. In Genesis, God promises in a covenant to give the Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars in return for following the path of the LORD. In Exodus, God takes the Israelites as God’s people in return for their fidelity. And the prophet Ezekiel promises that God will make a covenant of peace and will dwell with the people forever.
In this morning’s reading, we see those covenantal promises being fulfilled through Jesus’ work. Revelation foretells a new heaven and a new earth – a new Jerusalem with no more evil or sadness or hunger or suffering. The first things have passed away, and God’s people live in a new creation where contentment and security reign. This story of destination promises us a place in the kingdom of God where we see God and the Lamb face-to-face as they dwell with God’s people.
Revelation’s new creation might remind us of the Garden of Eden. And that’s the point. As Christians, our stories of destination point back to our stories of origin. Back to the beginning. Today’s story from Revelation gives us the confidence to say that as Christians we are headed somewhere in particular. We’re headed back to God. And this is true not just for us an individual people. It’s true in a larger, collective sense – dwelling eternally with God is the proper destiny of the church, the nations, and all of creation.
And that, my friends, is the source of our Christian hope. The hope we share with generations of Christians across time and space. With those whom we have loved, who we see no longer. Our hope is not a promise of unlimited material things. Our hope is of unlimited life in the eternal presence of God. That is the true ending of our story – to go back to the beginning, where all things are made new. Because God is the beginning and the end. The Alpha and the Omega. “It is done”. The promise-maker has already fulfilled the promise.
Amen.